Source: Enrollment surge on HealthCare.gov

About 29,000 people signed up for health insurance through HealthCare.gov on Sunday and Monday — a figure that surpasses the total for the whole month of October, an official familiar with the program told POLITICO.

The quickened pace of enrollments came as the White House hit its self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline to fix the troubled Affordable Care Act website.

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The preliminary numbers for the two-day period provide the clearest evidence yet that the federal exchange is on the mend. About 26,000 people selected a health plan during October and about 100,000 people did so in November, the official said.

HealthCare.gov relaunched Sunday after a two-month rush by federal officials to repair more than 400 software bugs and upgrade the hardware. President Barack Obama’s goal was to get the site working better for the vast majority of users.

Although the site is performing much better for consumers, insurance industry officials have said they continue to receive garbled reports on who is enrolling in their plans. The so-called back-end problems with the site could cause headaches for consumers when they attempt to claim their benefits on Jan. 1 if insurers continue to receive incomplete information.

The sharp increase in the pace of enrollments could begin to allay one of the industry’s other major fears — that after a two-month delay in standing up a functioning website, the administration won’t enroll enough people or the right mix of people by the March 30 deadline.

The Congressional Budget Office projected that 7 million would sign for Obamacare in 2014.

Republicans dismissed the latest figures as unimpressive, arguing that enrollment isn’t where it should be to hit the CBO target or the monthly estimates detailed in an administration memo released by the House Ways and Means Committee.

“The spectacular failure of this rollout has set expectations so embarrassingly low that Democrats are celebrating enrollment numbers that still only represent a fraction of what is needed for this law to work,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Data were not yet available from the 14 states and the District of Columbia that run their own insurance websites, the official said. The state exchanges surpassed the federal exchange in October with almost 80,000 enrollments.

The 29,000 enrollees for Sunday and Monday reflect individuals who have chosen a health plan, but they have not necessarily paid for the first month’s premium because coverage doesn’t begin until Jan. 1.